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Global experts criticize U.S. for economic and legal tactics

Thursday, September 05, 2002

By Ann McFeatters, Post-Gazette National Bureau

WASHINGTON -- A three-year study of anti-terrorism practices in 10 other nations indicates that much of what the United States has done in the year since Sept. 11 has been "reinventing the wheel," a panel of experts concluded yesterday.

The collection of papers about anti-terrorist campaigns, "Combating Terrorism: Strategies of Ten Countries" -- soon to be in book form -- argues that disrupting the financing of terrorist groups is difficult and not very effective, that lengthy negotiation sometimes works and that the U.S. characterization of the effort as a "war" carries legal implications that make other nations nervous, such as when suspected terrorists are held without legal charges.

"We want to keep our heads about us, without abandoning the rule of law," said Don Wallace, chairman of the International Law Institute.

Led by Yonah Alexander, director of the International Center for Terrorism Studies at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, the panelists compared experiences from their countries and agreed that terrorism is difficult and costly to combat because it involves zealotry and ideas.

Alexander said that even though the United States has been a target of terrorists for years, the Sept. 11 attacks created a "realization of our vulnerability" that has to be tempered with an equal understanding that the only approach to terrorism now is a global one.

Philip Wilcox, former coordinator for counterterrorism at the State Department, said the United States is still not doing a good job explaining the United States to millions of people with anti-American opinions or understanding Islamic radicalism and still is not adequately sharing its intelligence with its allies or doing adequate analysis of the information it has.

Ali Koknar, a Turkish security consultant who noted that 40,000 people have been killed in his country because of terrorism, agreed. "The United States wants assets frozen without sharing information on why and violating laws of other nations," he said. "People forget that Abu Nidal [a longtime terrorist leader just found dead in Iraq] was the Osama bin Laden of the 1980s; he killed hundreds of Americans.

"Reinventing the wheel costs time and lives. We have to be smart. We have to fight not just by military force but by guile."

Francis Vaz, political minister of the Indian Embassy, said the problem with the U.S. effort to curtail al-Qaida's financing is that it relies on freezing formal bank accounts, often with only a few dollars, and doesn't deal with the massive gold shipments, huge drug sales and complicated barter system that terrorists use today.

Alexander noted that terrorism is relatively cheap and that all the recent attacks on America, including 9/11 and the USS Cole, cost only thousands of dollars, not millions. But the effect on the U.S. economy was in the billions.

There also was agreement on the panel that in making the anti-terrorist campaign primarily a military maneuver the United States is going after terrorists "with a sledgehammer when a scalpel is needed," according to Koknar. He said that the effort to wipe out training camps, while dramatic, was not particularly effective because such camps tend to be primitive. "The training for 9/11 took place in Europe and the United States, not in Kandahar," he said. The rudiments of bomb-making are learned in Greece and on the Internet, he said.

The Potomac Institute's Alexander said the United States still has not learned that "the military solution is only one aspect of this, and no country can deal with this scourge unilaterally."

Thursday, September 05, 2002